October 24, 2010

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House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia and other Republicans have called for stripping NPR of federal funding after it fired analyst Juan Williams last week over comments he made about Muslims.

But while Republican National Chairman Michael Steele disagreed with NPR's decision, he said Sunday he wasn't sure it should be made a campaign issue nine days before the election.

“I don’t know if it’s a legitimate part of the campaign. I think what NPR did was overreaching,” Steele said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“It was a hyperspin and overreaction to his comments. [Williams] was expressing a personal perspective; he wasn't giving a political analysis. He wasn't being a pundit about the matter. He was expressing his own personal concerns that he had,” Steele added.

“The more appropriate thing to do, as we’ve seen with other cases ... you take them aside, you sit them down and go, ‘Wait a minute, that is a line you don’t need to cross.’ Immediately jumping to firing Juan over this was an overreaction,” Steele concluded.

“This is not the appropriate way to really handle this. I think that, you know, NPR is paying a little bit of a price for it,” Steele said.

When NBC host David Gregory asked whether federal funding for NPR should be cut, Steele said it wasn’t his decision.

“I'm sure the members of Congress who have raised that as a concern will address that at the appropriate time,” Steele said.

“Right now my focus, and the focus of those of us who are on the political side of this equation, are much more interested to getting to the elections on Nov. 2 so we can win and put in place a new Congress to look at questions like that.”

NPR fired Williams after he said on Fox News that he gets “nervous” when he sees people in Muslim garb boarding an airplane.

Eric Cantor's YouCut rocks. Seriously. And for a Sunday afternoon project, click over to the Citizen Review of the National Science Foundation, where you can search for active grants, and decide for yourself if you as a taxpayer feel that it's a worthwhile project. I found $180,000 grant to a couple of UCLA students to study the effect of drug culture retaliation. The students would then create a report and present to any law enforcement who was interested. But here's the punchline, the study was to be conducted in Amsterdam. As the abstract said, what better place to study this subject? I see it as redundant, law enforcement is acutely aware of gang and drug culture retaliation activity. I see it as a really, really cool way to get the American taxpayer to pay for a trip to Amsterdam. And hey, when there, I'm sure the students would immerse themselves in the culture, strictly for academic reasons only!